


In Which the Memoirist...

by hiddencait



Category: The Memoirs of Lady Trent - Marie Brennan, The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Memoirs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 11:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5495945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddencait/pseuds/hiddencait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>…is invited to a performance inspired by her own studies</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which the Memoirist...

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thelittlestbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlestbird/gifts).



> When I saw the opportunity to mix these two fandoms show up in the crossover thread, I was so excited! The worlds seemed incredibly suited for being mashed together, never mind that they take place in completely different alternate worlds. Lady Trent's voice was a delight to experiment with - I hope my giftee approves of how it came out! BTW, my apologies for not including Natalie - I've only read the first Lady Trent book, though the others are on my TBR mountain just waiting for me to get to them.
> 
> As always much much love to my darling beta Alyse - if any errors remain, they're due to my fiddling with this after she was through editing.

It was a Tuesday evening when the intriguing, if somewhat ostentatious invitation arrived through my letter box, its message immaculately inked in stark red and black against the white of the thick parchment.

 

_You are cordially invited to_

_Le Cirque des Rêves_

_appearing tonight, for one night only._

_Please present this invitation to the ticket booth for admittance._

_Sincerely,_

_P. Murray & W. Murray_

I knew what this vague missive referred to, of course. Most now knew of the supposedly “magical” carnival making the rounds all across the globe. I’d heard tell of the “wonders” that “defy imagination,” though I had never attended the follies myself. The circus had appeared perhaps five times near my home, but always while I had been away on one excursion or another. If the circus had a more set schedule, I might have delayed or hastened my journeys as so to align with a performance, but as haphazard as their business was run, I could hardly be expected to put my studies on halt on the off chance that the circus _might_ appear.

 

Now, however, it seemed I had no further excuses for missing the spectacle.

 

As I rose from my writing desk to confer with my schedule to ensure that I had no prior engagements that would prevent my attendance at the night’s performance, I accidentally dropped the invitation. That moment of clumsiness proved a propitious one. When I picked it up, I noticed an additional message penned upon the back – this one far more… rushed than the proper calligraphy on the front. Indeed, the message appeared to have been written by not one, but two hastily scribbling hands. I daresay it intrigued me far more than the official invitation did.

 

_Dear Lady Trent,_

_Please except our invitation – we are great admirers of your work, and we would be thrilled to show you how it has inspired our own performances!_

_Please do come. We would be honored._

_Sincerely (again),_

_P & W_

When I arrived at the outskirts of town later that evening, the gates of the circus were already open, allowing local patrons to enter into the frivolity beyond. I need not describe the appearance of the company in this memoir; many of the famed aficionados of The Night Circus have penned tales of their exploits, those accounts both scholastic and merely salacious by turn. In either case, the spectacle of the stark tents and clockwork creations have been well documented, and I would only be echoing those descriptions.

To be fair, it was my experience that those accounts were far more accurate than I might have guessed prior to my own attendance. The entrance to the circus was fantastical to say the least.

 

As I approached the ticket booth, a young man appeared around its corner with a smile and reached out a hand, taking my invitation and nodding approvingly. His voice, when he spoke, surprised me by carrying an American accent, one that seemed out of place amongst the wonder-worldly atmosphere of the spectacle around us. If he noticed my surprise, he gave no sign. “Lady Trent, it is an honor to have you here this evening. The twins will be thrilled you have accepted their invitation.”

 

“The twins?” I had noticed the names on the card, but I had only been able to surmise that they were clearly family; the relationship between the pair had been no clearer.

 

He nodded. “Indeed, Penelope and Winston, or Poppet and Widget as most know them.” He offered an arm which I took and allowed him to lead me into the circus proper. “They are most excited to gain your opinion upon their act tonight. You are a singular expert on the subject, of course.”

 

“What subject might that be?” I asked, guessing that he likely meant my studies of the draconic kind, but wondering at the nature of these twins’ performance if that were true.

 

In my experience, dragons rarely perform as one might wish them to.

 

He did not answer, merely smiled enigmatically again and continued to lead the way past intricate sculptures and elaborate tents of every size and shape. As we walked, the young man was greeted fondly by many: from rêveurs clearly marked by the flash of red about their person in mimic of the circus itself to others bedecked in fantastical costumes who could only belong to the performing troupe. Each of these pressed their hands to his and offered smiles and brushes of lips against cheeks, then continued on their own way with little pause.

 

Somehow, despite my attention to my surroundings, I failed to catch my guide’s name during any of these greetings, and I only realized it upon returning home.

 

After what seemed like an hour or more of wandering, though never aimless, but simply unhurried, we arrived at one tent among many, and my guide pulled aside the flap over the door and gestured me in with a bow. I found myself part of a small crowd populated as much by children as adults, which startled me. I had not noticed many young folk out among the promenade, as it were. Yet here they were, laughing and bouncing excitedly in their seats round the rim of tent. I was waved to a pair of open seats at the center of one side of the tent, the young man seating himself beside me.

 

Then the unseen lights about the seating areas went out in a blink, leaving only two points illuminated in the center ring. There stood a young man and woman, both smiling mischievously at each other before bowing in unison. As one, they then knelt to lift the edges of a large sheet on the ground that I had somehow failed to notice. With a burst of motion and music, the pair leapt to their feet, sending the sheet billowing up above them. A cloud of _something_ exploded out from under the sheet and into the air about the crowd in a rush of color and breeze. The glittering cloud then began to all but dance about the tent, following each of the twins one after the other in a dizzying whirl that dazzled my eyes so much it took several minutes before I realized the truth of what I watched.

 

“Sparklings. My word, they’ve _trained sparklings!_ ” I turned to my guide with shock, but he only smiled broadly. No dress code held sway here, oh no. The sparklings themselves defied the theme of red, black, and white, their scaled selves a wash of jewel tones that dazzled one when compared to the homogeneity outside the tent. “But, but how could they have possibly…?”

 

I knew all too well how flighty the beasts were. There was little room in a sparkling’s brain for aught but flitting about. That the Murrays had achieved this kind of directed performance with not one but dozens of the creatures was far more than I would have thought possible.

 

The young man at my side seemed to share none of my incredulity, watching the choreographed dance with a gentle sort of awe instead of disbelief, before speaking again.

 

“It was kittens before, you know, but as we have grown older so have those kits. Performing cats are still a marvel, to be sure, but their current performance lacks the… whimsy it once had. Widget is the one who stumbled upon the sparklings.” The young man paused to cheer along with the rest of the crowd as the twins directed the wing of sparklings in a particular complex pattern. As the applause faded back into awestruck delight, he went on. “The twins still perform with the cats, of course. They alternate between the two, though there’s never a set schedule. I doubt they know themselves which creature they’d bring out to play with until right before the set begins. Except for tonight of course,” he amended, with a side long glance to me. “They’ve been looking forward to tonight and showing off the sparklings to you.”

 

“They are… This is incredible,” I managed, attention trained on the fluttering beasts twisting and turning in and around their human counterparts.

 

“Poppet and Widget hoped you would think so,” the young man replied, satisfaction for his friends clear in his voice. “There should be time for you to meet with them after their turn has finished. I hope you don’t mind.”

 

“Not at all,” I answered. No, I would not mind meeting the pair that had achieved such a feat in the slightest.

 

The conclusion of the performance climaxed in a stormy cyclone of wings that spun about the ring once, twice, and then out of the tent proper and back towards another compartment of some sort that I hadn’t noticed.

 

The act ended both far too quickly and not nearly quickly enough in my opinion. My desire to speak with the Murrays was equal to my delight in the exhibition before me. I was entranced by the colors and kaleidoscope of tiny winged things. It was just unbearably lovely, and I could have watched for hours had my desire for scientific study not pressed at me.

 

My guide seemed to sense this, touching my arm gently to draw my attention back to him. “We will have to wait a few moments. They’ll want to greet the children before they leave.”

 

As he’d said, the young people in the audience scampered up to chatter at the pair and coo over Ms. Murray’s cupped hands which I guessed must hold one or two sparklings so that the children might view them from up close. Once again, I marveled at the ease with which the creatures were handled. Finally the crowd began to thin, and my guide bade me wait but a moment more while he fetched the performers.

 

Before he could reach them, however, another pair of performers appeared at the back of the tent and moved in to whisper urgently in the twins’ ears. They were somehow hard to look at closely, their features faded and indistinct though the tent was not poorly lit. At their arrival, my guide increased his pace to meet with the quartet, and the four conferred with each other rapidly, the gestures of the twins and the young man growing more stressed though the strangers seemed no more frantic than when they’d arrived.

 

Ms. Murray finally separated herself from the circle to turn towards me, her face a picture of disappointed apology. Without a word, she curtsied, a move that should have looked laughable with the tiny skirt and wildly patterned leggings of her performance costume, but instead had the kind of quiet elegance that pulled me to my feet to return the curtsy. She smiled, albeit with a touch of melancholy and then turned back to the group, tugging her brother’s arm until they and the strange pair slipped away through the same exit the sparklings had used.

 

The young man who’d accompanied me returned to my side only to offer his regrets. “An… issue has arisen that I fear Poppet, Widget, and myself must attend to at once. Please, enjoy the rest of the circus, and refreshments are our treat this evening.” He produced a few oversized coins embossed with the name of the circus on either side and pressed them into my hands. “We hope our business will not take long and that we will join you later if you are still within our tent walls, but if not, I would like to say for myself and my associates that it was an honor to meet you, and I hope we meet again.”

 

I gave him my goodbyes in return, and then he followed after the others, leaving me to rise and exit the tent on my own. With nothing better to do while I awaited their possible return, I availed myself of the refreshments at a nearby stall serving a delectable spiced cider and a chocolate pastry confection unlike any I’d tried before, but that was every bit as delicious as it looked.

 

Then, well then, I simply wandered and lost myself for longer than I expected.

 

I did not encounter the young man again that night, nor did the twins who issued my invitation seek me out as they had apparently hoped to. I must confess I hardly noticed until dawn came, the pale light the only thing to draw me out of my musings.

 

It’s true: the Circus of Dreams was indeed impressive enough – no, I shall speak truly here – _magical_ enough to draw even my busy mind away from thoughts of scientific consideration and into a realm of imagination and wonder. I could not explain it then. For so long, I’d thought of myself as a naturalist and student of the sciences above all else, but that place defied that sense of self and embraced a glimpse of _other._

 

As I left with the last few stragglers, all bearing the red standard of the circus’s most loyal patrons, I found myself looking back for one last chance to catch the eye of the pair of young people who had drawn me there, but alas, neither Ms. Murray nor Mr. Murray appeared. Part of me felt I should be affronted at the slight as it was _they_ who had invited _me_ and one would think they’d attend to their guest. But I could not help but remember the utterly disappointed face of the young woman as she and her brother had hurried after their fellow circus mates, off to whatever it was that so desperately needed their attention.

 

I could not help but think they’d had no choice in the matter when they did not seek me out.

 

Once home, I resolved to broach the matter of my experiences to those of my acquaintance who I knew to be members of the dedicated rêveurs. I would not, could not, set aside my own studies and expeditions to wait for the circus to reappear, nor to travel endlessly in its wake, hoping to chance upon it again.

 

But I did, in fact, wish to meet with those remarkable young people. And, I must confess, I did want to see the wonders of the circus again.

 

And if my travels just happened to coincide with an appearance of _Le Cirque des Rêves_ in some foreign land?

 

Well then, I might find I owe a debt to some strange and subtle magic beyond my knowledge and experience.

 

What a marvelous thought.

 


End file.
